What's A Royal Portrait Worth? For Kate Middleton Painting, About $300,000

Even before Kate Middleton’s pregnancy, people were smitten with her. And a bit daft. There was the Princess Kate jelly bean sighting that apparently didn’t sell on eBay, as its owner had hoped, and the portrait of her made up of postage stamps, a folk art confection that leaves even the most seasoned appraiser agog.

And so, at some point in the not too distant future, it will be delivered for all the world to see: a portrait of the future monarch. But what will it look like? And more interestingly to those consumed in the art market, how much will it be worth?

Royal portraits have been around going back to the time of Tutankhamun and even earlier, though practices have changed radically over the past 150 years. Well into the 19th century, royalty commissioned the best artists of the day to record their images for the present and for posterity. In Europe, brilliant examples by Titian, Rembrandt, and van Dyck, and Reynolds abound.

With the advent of photography and the development of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, a schism emerged. Academic painting sought perfection of the craft of painting and an improved view of reality – that is, flattering portraits, made to order. The avant garde – beginning with Manet and moving on to Cezanne, Matisse, Dali, de Kooning, and beyond – insisted on the individual vision of the artist and the notion that potato eaters and card players were as worthy a subject as royalty.

And then there’s the question of what would a minimalist, abstract, white-on-white portrait even look like? How would the sitter know it was actually their royal self, and not the artist taking liberties?

Just think about what artists were doing in the 1930s. Pablo Picasso was painting his lover and muse, Marie-Therese Walter, and while in 2013 one not especially inspired version of Walter sold for $45 million at auction, another changed hands for $155 million.

Today, eighty years on, $150,000 may not sound like a lot of money for a royal portrait. But consider this: Brock’s next most expensive painting sold at auction brought around $25,000 – a mere sixth of the royal portrait.

There are two takeaways here: since the dawn of Impressionism, great art begins within the artist and is not commanded by commission. And for academic painters, including those who make a large part of their livings from portraits, royalty sells.

(An even more extreme example involves Australian artist William Dargie, who was a seven-time winner of the Archibald Prize for portraiture. His Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth The Second 1954 sold at auction to the National Museum of Australia in 2009 for around $110,000, nearly ten-fold the amount fetched in 2006 for his portrait of General Douglas MacArthur, the next highest price work of his to sell at auction.)

The 1980s royal news was Prince Charles (a portrait from 1980) and Diana, Princess of Wales (1981), who married in 1981. The National Portrait Gallery commissioned portraits from Bryan Organ, a British artist known for his portraits and the godfather of Prince Harry. Organ’s auction prices top out at $27,000 for his 1977 Still life with lilies in a vase, and the highest price for a painting with a human figure is $4,036 for his 1971 Girl by Pool. All of which is immaterial, given the royalty bounce. David Wilson Fine Art, a London gallery, currently has a meticulously finished preparatory drawing for the portrait of Diana, expected to sell for approximately $110,000. Had Organ made additional copies of Diana's portrait– as had Brock and Dargie – and if it was to come to market, the painting could fetch as much as $400,000.

In 1982, Andy Warhol turned his attention to Charles and Diana, and his portraits of them sold for $600,000 (in 2007) and $1.5 million (in 2012), respectively – despite the fact that his rendering of Diana was exceptionally wan. By comparison, his 1981 painting of Mickey Mouse (from the Myth Series) fetched $3.4 million (in 2011); and his 1980 portrait of Debbie Harry notched $6.0 million (in 2011). Royalty, in contemporary culture and the art market, isn’t what it used to be.

A further wrinkle in portraiture is whether it’s actually commissioned. Traditionally, the subject sits for the artist, making the work an authorized portrait. Nicola Jane Philipps’s 2009 Prince William, Duke of Cambridge; Prince Harrypresents the sons of Charles and Diana in appealing and unusually casual stances but in military dress with a portrait of George Bernard Shaw by Augustus Johns in the background. The painting measures 54-1/8 in. by 58-1/8 in., more than double the size of the smallest commission portraits the artist takes, which is 24 in. by 20 in., which have prices starting at $33,525. In terms of market value, and extra copy of Philipps’s portrait of the lads would likely sell at auction for over $200,000.

But what would a portrait of the princes bring if it had been done by an internationally recognized artist? $804,601. That’s what an unauthorized painting of William and Harry by contemporary artist Elizabeth Peyton fetched at auction in 2006 and which today would be worth significantly more. Like Warhol, Peyton worked from photographic images. Unlike Warhol, Peyton depicts subjects through the lens of feelings she has for them: compassion was not high on a list of Warhol’s interests.

Most recently, there’s the example of the 2012 portrait of Kate Middleton, herself. Middleton sat for artist Paul Emsley, who took numerous photographs of her and worked from as he created his portrait. To say that the painting – an oversized, 45-3/8 in. x 38 in. canvas of a strong woman’s head and shoulders, a smile about to burst open, and a direct warmth – evoked shrill shrieks of disgust from critics would not be an overstatement. The criticisms came from people who expected a 19th-century style romanticized princess, not a 21st century woman who intends to put her position to good use. The critics seemed to resent the apparently heretical notion that virtue is embodied in the person, not the title or trappings.

Commissioned by Sir Hugh Leggatt in memory of the remarkable art historian Sir Denis Mahon through the Art Fund in 2012, the portrait cost $55,375. If Emsley, like Brock and Dargie, had created a nearly identical portrait for himself, what would it be worth? Despite (or because of) the conservative carping, and because it’s a one-of-a-kind image, as far as the art market is concerned, and because it’s an early portrait of a future queen, over $300,000 would be a safe guess. England may be in the midst of an austerity program, but royalistas, themselves, regardless of where they live, still have money to burn. What it would be worth in 50 years is anyone’s guess, though it would be more than Emsley’s other portraits.

The perverse fact is that in today’s art world, flattering royal portraits are a decidedly bourgeois affair and come with bourgeois prices. Or any portrait, really. Who would be brave enough to sit for a portrait that will be completed as the artist wishes, regardless of the sitter’s feelings? Obviously someone who cares more about the strength of the work of art than about appearance, and the accompanying cost is probably too high for many.

But not all. Perhaps the most interesting portrait of royalty in the 20th century is Lucien Freud’s take on Elizabeth II, painted in 2000-2001. England’s most important artist of the second half of the 20th century, Freud apparently took on the commission as a favor. Known for his psychologically probing (he was Sigmund’s grandson, after all) and decidedly unflattering portraits of his family and friends, Freud once said, "The subject matter is autobiographical, it's all to do with hope and memory and sensuality and involvement, really.”

Freud’s small (9-1/4 by 6 in.) portrait, HM Queen Elizabeth II caused a ruckus. It was excoriated as a “travesty” and entirely the wrong type of painting for a portrait. The critics were right: it wasn’t about her Royalty, with a capital “R”, and the tiara was a late addition. It is about her service, patience, and wisdom. I won’t hazard a guess regarding value – everything may have a value, but not everything has a price – and it’s certainly not in play. But somewhere in the low eight figures sounds about right.

As William and Kate consider future portraits of the likely future monarch, they will need to consider any number of things – which artists are friends of friends, which are skilled, which will be flattering.

They may also want to consider the example of William’s grandmother, who late in life submitted her image to the probing gaze of a man who, in his own realm, was her equal. It was a noble, fearless act itself. Hopefully William and Kate will have as much courage. Even if the artist makes the infant look - as so many commoners actually do - like Winston Churchill.